My colleagues and I are pleased to announce the availability of version 2.0.4 of the MITRE Annotation Toolkit.

What is it?-----------

MAT is a suite of cooperating, loosely-coupled tools for supporting the human annotator in constructing models and corpora for computational linguistics and analysis, especially using the iterative 'tag a little, learn a little' workflow. MAT includes MITRE's open source Java Carafe CRF trainer/tagger; a Web-based annotation and process control UI; a flexible and powerful scorer; an XML-configurable experiment harness; a workflow manager; and more.

MAT is platform-independent, open source, and compatible (with some effort) with multiple trainer/tagger engines and hand annotation tools.

The thrust of MAT 2.0 has been extending many of the MAT capabilities to deal with relations and other dimensions of a significantly more elaborate annotation model. You can find a list of changes and improvements in the documentation.

How stable is it?-----------------

For many years, MAT has served as the underpinning of MITRE's Identification Scrubber Toolkit (MIST), an open-source package for deidentification of free-text medical documents. As MIST, it has been used by a wide range of researchers in this area. MAT itself has been used extensively by MITRE in its internal research and development projects, and by a variety of MITRE's sponsors.

Is it supported?----------------

Unfortunately, no. MITRE doesn't (currently) have the resources to provide public open-source support. There is a public mailing list on Sourceforge, which the MITRE developers subscribe to, but we likely won't have the resources to answer.

On the other hand, MAT has been under development for almost seven years, and has seen a good deal of use, and comes with a ton of documentation.

Future work-----------

MAT 3.0 is slated for public release in the early spring. It will feature significantly more flexible workflows for multi-step annotation tasks, as well as a general hand-reconciliation tool for conflicting annotations, including relations and events.